By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

Book Information

The many different things that are said to mean things seem to have littlein common: people mean to do various things; tools and other artifacts aremeant for various things; people mean various things by using words andsentences; natural signs mean things; representations in people's mindsalso presumably mean things. In Varieties of Meaning Ruth Garrett Millikanargues that these apparently different kinds of meaning can only beunderstood in relation to each other.

What does meaning in the sense of purpose (when something is said to bemeant for something) have to do with meaning in the sense of representingor signifying? Millikan argues that the explicit human purposes, explicithuman intentions, are represented purposes. They do not merely representpurposes; they possess the purposes that they represent. She argues furtherthat things that signify, intentional signs such as sentences, aredistinguished from natural signs by having purpose essentially; therefore,unlike natural signs, intentional signs can misrepresent or be false.

Part I discusses "Purposes and Cross-Purposes"--what purposes are, thepurposes of people, of their behaviors, of their body parts, of theirartifacts, and of the signs they use. Part II then describes a previouslyunrecognized kind of natural sign, "locally recurrent" natural signs, andseveral varieties of intentional signs, and discusses the ways in whichrepresentations themselves are represented. Part III offers a novelinterpretation of the way language is understood and of the relationbetween semantics and pragmatics. Part IV discusses perception and thought,exploring stages in the development of inner representations, from thesimplest organisms whose behavior is governed by perception-action cyclesto the perceptions and intentional attitudes of humans.

Ruth Garrett Millikan is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at theUniversity of Connecticut. She is the author of Language, Thought, andOther Biological Categories (MIT Press, 1984) and White Queen Psychologyand Other Essays for Alice (MIT Press, 1995) and On Clear and Confused Ideas.